Abstract
Co‐encapsulation of bead carriers and biological cells in microfluidics has become a powerful technique for various biological assays in single‐cell genomics and drug screening because of its distinct capability of single‐cell confinement. However, current co‐encapsulation approaches exist a trade‐off between cell/bead pairing rate and probability of multiple cells in individual droplets, significantly limiting the effective throughput of single‐paired cell‐bead droplets production. Deformability‐assisted dUal‐Particle encapsuLation via Electrically acTivated Sorting (DUPLETS) system is reported to overcome this problem. The DUPLETS can differentiate the encapsulated content in individual droplets and sort out targeted droplets via a combined screening of mechanical and electrical characteristics of single droplets in label‐free manners and with the highest effective throughput in comparison to current commercial platforms. The DUPLETS has been demonstrated to enrich single‐paired cell‐bead droplets to over 80% (above eightfold higher than current co‐encapsulation techniques). It eliminates multicell droplets to 0.1% whereas up to ≈24% in 10× Chromium. It is believed that merging DUPLETS into the current co‐encapsulation platforms can meaningfully elevate sample quality in terms of high purity of single‐paired cell‐bead droplets, low fraction of multicell droplets, and high cell viability, which can benefit a multitude of biological assay applications.